A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard.

It took Doc longer to go places than other people. He didn't drive fast and he stopped and ate hamburgers very often. Driving up to Lighthouse Avenue he waved at a dog that looked around and smiled at him.

Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again - quiet and magical.

Love, Barbara thought, is a four-letter word, but most of the boys I meet seem to have it confused with another four-letter word that people don't mention in polite company.

He was younger than she and had long hair that fell into his eyes when he shook his head, and he mumbled when he spoke. If you asked him a question he would wriggle and scratch himself and look at the floor as if he were feeling out the line, and finally he would grunt some extraordinarily emotional result like: "Yeah, let's go to the movies."

She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one's thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.

... og kanskje var det derfor Terese ikke lenger kunne kjenne igjen den magiske følelsen når hun kom inn dit, eller kanskje det bare var voksenlivet som ikke hadde plass til dette andre.

She was quite sure that she loved him more than he loved her, but he was a man, after all, and men had other things to worry about.

In between talk were pockets of silence,

Jeg hadde min Sturm-und-Drang-tid i San Fransisco, klatret i åsene i omegnen, sov i parkene, jobbet i dokkene, marsjerte og huiet i demonstrasjonstog. På en måte synes jeg at jeg eide byen like meget som den eide meg.

Fate is for the broken, the selfish, the simple, the lost, and the forever lonely

The only single piece of decoration was a painting hung beside the window - a reproduction of Munch's The Storm.

Dagen etter begynte pappa på sommarprosjektet. Det gjer han kvar sommar. Prosjektet er som regel noko stort og vanskeleg som skal byggast. Og det er alltid mamma som har bestemt det.

He looked like the sort of man who had read all of Marcel Proust in bed.

In the 1960s, mandatory retirement age for flight attendants was thirty-five, but it was expected that they use their position wisely to secure a husband before then.

Great lifestyle, he said, great food, and totally unpolitically correct women with great underwear.

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world.

Lennie, who had been watching, imitated George exactly. He pushed himself back, drew up his knees, embraced them, looked over to George to see whether he had it just right.

To have no plans, which is to say, to have no longings and hopes, to be satisfied with your lot, to accept what the world doles out to you from the one sunrise to the next - in order to live like that you must want very little, as little as humanly possible.

Du må da forstå at livet er vanskelig nok som det er, om man ikke skal straffes for det etterpå. Man blir trøstet, det er jo hele ideen.